Evan Edgar Wright (1912-1999) was born in Garnett, Kansas to Joshua Leven “Levy” Wright and Grace Iler (DeWolf) Wright, the second of six children. Levy Wright was a printer who lived in numerous towns across Kansas and Missouri, at one time owning the Garnett News.

Evan Wright graduated from Topeka high school in 1930 and attended Washburn University, University of Kansas, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He married Betty Firner (1914-2004) in 1934, and they had five children: Tom, Judith, Elizabeth, Sara, and Rosemary.

In 1935 Evan Wright began working for the Kansas State Health Department. In 1940 he became chief of the Bureau of Food and Drug in Kansas, where he fought to get unsafe and unfairly advertised products off the shelves. He oversaw the seizing of contaminated foods, the investigation of food-borne illnesses, and established safety standards for food, drugs, and cosmetics, as well as household products. As the chairman of the State Board of Health’s poison control committee, Wright established the first poison control centers across Kansas. When Wright retired in 1977, Kansas Governor Robert Bennett presented him with the Distinguished Service Award.

Wright was a member of the Kansas Public Health Association, the National Labeling Committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Congress on Medical Quackery, and the Association of Food and Drug Officials, from whom he received the Harvey Wiley Award as the most outstanding food and drug director in 1962 for protecting the public from fraud and harmful products. He received the Special Service Award and the Samuel J. Crumbine Award from the Kansas Public Health Association.

Wright built his own electric lawn mower and arc welder, publishing how-to articles about these and other topics in mechanical magazines. He also published children’s stories in various magazines and textbooks. Wright moved to Hiawatha, Kansas after retiring from the Kansas Health Department, where he wrote articles and a regular column in the Hiawatha Daily World. Wright acquired and transcribed the Civil War diaries of his maternal great-grandfather, Charles DeWolf.

Charles Wesley DeWolf (1834-1927) was a teacher and bandleader who married Elizabeth Wesley Newton (1841-1915) in 1859 in Lee County, Iowa. DeWolf joined the Union Black Hawk Cavalry at Alexandria, Missouri in 1861. He kept a daily journal of his Civil War experience from 1861 until his discharge for disability in 1864, at which point he was 1st Lieutenant in the 7th Missouri Cavalry.

DeWolf returned to Keokuk, Iowa after the war, then lived for a few years in Cincinnati, Ohio and Lawrence, Kansas, before settling in Garnett, Kansas in the 1870s. He and his son George, Evan Wright’s maternal grandfather, ran a furniture factory. In 1906 Charles DeWolf organized a reunion for the survivors of the Battle of Prairie Grove in Garnett, Kansas. After his wife’s death, DeWolf lived with his sister, Aurelia Siess, in Pasadena, California, where he died in 1927.

[Information pulled from collection materials, including the Crumbine Banquet program also available online at kpha.crumbinemedal.1970.pdf, and from findagrave.com.]